Are You Getting the Most from Your VoIP Office Phone System?

If you’ve got a VoIP business phone system in your office, then you might assume that you’re already doing all the right things when it comes to accelerating and optimizing business communications.

While this is certainly true for some organizations, it’s also entirely possible that you’re failing to make full use of the assets at your disposal.

With that in mind, let’s look at some of the ways you can wring as much value as possible from the VoIP business phone system you have at your fingertips.

Have you considered the range of device compatibility available?

It’s all well and good having a VoIP office phone system in place so that employees can make and receive calls while they’re at their desk, but what about when they’re on the move?

Many modern providers offer mobile apps that are compatible with on-site phone systems, enabling a whole array of features and functionality to be unlocked in a portable context.

This also ties into the idea of exploiting call forwarding capabilities to their full potential. Every missed call costs your company money, so by having inbound calls routed to mobile devices if the landline extension is not manned makes a lot of sense.

Do you know what third party integrations are supported?

Another important aspect of VoIP phone systems which makes them desirable compared with old-school PBX setups is that they can be easily integrated with a range of other software solutions and services.

The trick is to make sure that you know what third party platforms your system supports, and to implement the available integrations sooner rather than later.

For example, many modern phone solutions can be combined with a CRM service, allowing calls from customers to be tracked, monitored and analyzed alongside the other aspects of your communications.

This can help boost conversion rates, improve customer loyalty and make it simpler to manage support cases as well as complaints.

Is there adequate bandwidth on offer?

Because a VoIP business phone system relies on an internet connection to function as intended, you need to ensure that your office has enough bandwidth to support the volumes of calls that you experience in the course of a given working day.

It’s not just about the speed of the connection, but also about the amount of traffic it can handle simultaneously.

So your VoIP setup could be hamstrung by your broadband service, especially if it is also having to share the connection with all the other network traffic generated by your on-site devices.

A lack of bandwidth can compromise the quality of the audio during VoIP voice calls, which is something that customers will notice straight away.

Are employees trained adequately?

The only way to ensure that your VoIP phone system is being leveraged optimally is to provide the right training to the people that will be using it. Your employees deserve to know what they can do with the communications assets at their disposal, and since so much business is still done by phone, it is a concern you cannot ignore.

Top VoIP providers will have a wealth of resources oriented around training end users, from full-blown courses and programs to straightforward digital documentation. How you harness these assets is up to you, but the one thing you cannot justify doing is just letting team members learn to use your phone systems through trial and error.

Conclusion

To make the most of your office’s VoIP setup, you need to look at what it can do and squeeze every drop of value from the package you are paying for.

Effort will be involved upfront, but the long term benefits will more than make up for any initial struggles you face.